Pebble

Y Combinator is officially adding three new team members to its roster this morning. Gustaf Alstromer, formerly product leader of Airbnb’s growth team, is joining YC as a partner. Meanwhile Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky is taking a visiting partner role and Jocelyn Robancho is coming on board to assist with organizing YC’s startup batches.
Though Alstromer and Migicovsky… Read More

Yahoo Finance has nabbed a couple of photos reported to show Fitbit’s upcoming smartwatch, along with a handful of reports that make the whole undertaking sound like one big fiasco. Sources are talking complaints about design, production delays, antenna issues and software problems. Read More

The end is near for Pebble. The latest update to Pebble watches should extend their life a bit longer by removing the dependency on cloud servers. This allows the devices to work without the Pebble services that have up until now been required for many user interactions. Read More

Among the tidbits found in Fitbit’s disappointing new financial filing is the fact that it apparently picked up Pebble’s assets for a relative song. Although the company didn’t reveal the actual numbers when the acquisition was announced, reports pegged it at upwards of $40 million. According to today’s filing, the amount Fitbit paid is actually $23 million. Read More

It’s a wait and see moment for wrist-worn devices. After a few years of betting heavily on the space, this most recent CES didn’t offer much; save for two or three smartwatch announcements, some partnerships and a couple of middling bands, the industry seems to have largely shifted its focus toward the connected home and the seemingly attainable dream of sticking Alexa in… Read More

Pebble has had a long, one might say rocky road. As one of the earliest and biggest crowdfunding successes, it showed the potential and perils of hardware startups that were increasingly having to scale from back-of-napkin idea to a global operation almost overnight. Read More

RIP Pebble… The wearable maker that pioneered wrist-based notifications before Apple and many others waded into the smartwatch space has confirmed it’s closing its doors as an independent entity. Read More

With the coming destruction of Pebble and the announcement by Motorola that it doesn’t “see enough pull in the market to put [a new smartwatch] out at this time,” you would be excused for thinking the smartwatch world is contracting. This is correct, but this is not the end of for wearables.
Apple sold 1.1 million Apple Watches in 2016, 73% less than it sold in 2015. The… Read More

Latest Crunch Report

When rumors first surfaced about a Fitbit acquisition of Kickstarter king Pebble, concerned backers were understandable concerned about what the news would mean for the status of their unreleased devices.
While its hard to know how such a move might ultimately impact support for the company’s existing line of products, at the very least, Pebble 2 buyers can breathe a relative sigh… Read More

Things have changed a lot in the four and a half years since Pebble first took to Kickstarter to help fund its first device. Apple’s entered the space, Samsung has released about 200 different devices and Google has attempted to create some semblance of consistency among dozens of new players — all while fitness wearable manufacturers have continued to blur the lines of what an… Read More

While it’s easy to point to products like the Pebble Smart Watch as a sign that crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter are gaining ground against traditional institutional financiers and angels, the reality is that the vast majority of projects were never in the sights of Sand Hill Road. Rather, Kickstarter is illustrating that all it takes to sustain innovation outside of Silicon Valley… Read More

Pebble is getting ready to start shipping new hardware, including the Pebble 2 and Pebble Time 2, but first it has something for both iPhone and Android based device owners. The new Pebble software update includes some big tweaks to how Pebble operates, both for end users and developers, including improvements to actions and a brand new health app.
The key components of the update include… Read More

Time for a 12-million gun salute, as the newest Pebble Kickstarter campaign closed its doors with $12.8m raised from almost 67k backers, becoming the third-most-backed crowdfunding campaign on the popular crowdfunding platform. Pebble’s campaign settles into Kickstarter’s most-funded leaderboard surrounded by some familiar faces: three of the top four most successful campaigns… Read More

Sure Pebble put its best forward when it launched not one but three new products the other week, but a startup’s got to stagger a little bit of news to keep us interested ahead of launch (though judging by its current tally of $9.7 million on Kickstarter, the company is doing just fine in the buzz department, thank you very much).
Today’s news entails the Pebble Core, the real… Read More

“This is Pebble Core,” Eric Migicovsky says with a smile. “It’s our first non-watch product. The simplest way to explain it is that it’s a computer that fits on your keychain. It’s a tiny Android computer without a screen. It has 3D, GPS, Wi-Fi, a little bit of memory and both Android and JavaScript apps run on Pebble’s JavaScript… Read More

The weather’s finally starting to look like spring here in New York City, and it’s time to really put those fitness trackers to good use. For those who rely on a Pebble watch to keep track of their paces, health monitoring gets a bit better today, with version 3.12 of the smartwatch maker’s firmware and app.
The update marks the arrival of Mobile Health Snapshot, a hub… Read More

Smartwatch pioneer Pebble is laying off 25 percent of its staff amid increased financial concerns. This situation has been coming. Last year, we reported the company was in some trouble and had turned to debt funding and loans, as well as traditional investor cash, “in order to stay afloat.” Read More